The twenty-five cent stamp; why it's here and why it shouldn't be

Washington Monthly, Nov, 1987 by Marianne Szegedy-Maszak

But the Postal Service has been known to cook the books. Postal investigators recently found that postal workers making "random' mail checks were weeding out late letters from the sample. Clerks who played it straight and thereby showed the Postal Service in a bad light, the investigators found, were confronted by their supervisors. In at least two instances, when honest clerks refused to relent, they were demoted. In Atlanta recently, 11 supervisors were demoted or suspended for tampering with the results; investigators, on the other side of a two-way mirror, filmed them removing stale mail. Small wonder. Postmasters get cash bonuses for good numbers (funded by our rate hikes) and since they know the day before which routes will be sampled, it is easy to encourage good "performance.'

25 cents a lick

In filing for their latest rate hike, postal officals have once again invoked the rhetoric of the bottom line. Without the hike, they say, the system will sink $6 billion into debt by October 1988. The mail has to pay for itself, they say.

This is the double standard of the postal service: it has little accountability to Congress or to the consumer. Its watchdog, the Board of Governors, to which each president makes a few appointments, essentially rubber stamps the actions of management. (Since reorganization it has never killed a rate hike.) But when catastrophe threatens because of poor planning, the Postal Service turns to Congress and the consumer for another bailout.

Not surprisingly, during moments like this, when the rates goes up, the little guy bears most of the burden. The most recent rate proposal is no exception. In second-class mail, the largest circulation magazines, heavy with advertising, will face about a 10 percent increase. By contrast, small circulation magazines with few ads will suffer increases of more than 20 percent. Where the Postal Service must compete with other services--in overnight mail, for example--the proposed price will actually drop, with the minimum charge falling from $8.35 to $7.74, and the maximum fee tumbling from $104.95 to $70.00. But in first-class mail, where the Postal Service is the only game in town, we'll all start licking 25 cent stamps.

In the world of quasi-independent government entities, that is what's known as business as usual.